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148 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
- “F.E.A.R.”
o Fascination with fantasy; subconscious; non-rational; ways in which human behavior is determined by things we don’t even know exists
o Expressionism; a strong belief that there are things within artists that demand expression
o Abstraction; artists are looking at chaos around them, longing for more simplicity; wish it was possible to strip away the lies, the superfluous, and the polluting
o Realism; Desired by artists who want to document their observations of life in the 20th century; impact of mechanization, urbanization, war, conflict
- Historical Context
o Hostility between groups of people in Europe based on competitions in imperialism and nationalism
o Impact of capitalism run amuck, materialism of the urban age—Huge gaps between the wealthy and poor
o Rapid modernization and machine age speeding things up;concept of time seems to be forgotten
o Darwin’s ideas of evolution sinking down through population, added with teachings of Freud
 People begin to feel animalistic, like they don’t know themselves, don’t know what they would do; sexuality becomes less and less taboo
- Pre-WWI Fantasy
o artists are most influenced by Freud; explore anything that deals with fantasies, dreams, nightmares, irrational fears; very influenced by the Symbolists
Precursors to Surrealism
- deChirico
Pre-WWI Fantasy
o father was a railroad engineer—see little trains in background of images
o really easy to recognize
 dark gray sky—weird light, casts long ominous shadows
 orange ground
 random objects on the ground
 looks like the same sort of deserted square that has these huge colonnades
 big white statue in middle
o gives them strange titles
o Basically repeated objects over and over again
o Suspenseful, enigmatic images
o Setting for weird dreams/nightmares
- Chagall
Pre-WWI Fantasy
o grew up in a tiny little Jewish fishing village in Russia, but leaves it behind and moves to Paris
o In his images, see an interesting juxtaposition of dream-like images and mysteries of his childhood, the fishing village
o “The Red Tower”—Eiffel Tower
o combines cubist/prismatic effects with the bold color of The Fauve
o Ignores physics, spacial realism, scale
o Completely unnaturalistic color
o Dream-like images
o Mood is almost uplifting and joyful much of the time
- Duchamp
Pre-WWI Fantasy
o Very much influenced Muybridge’s early motion picture photograph—Single frame with overlapping stages of motion
o “Nude Descending a Staircase #2”
 Has been called by some as the most important painting of century
 Was the “bad boy” at the most important art exhibit in American history; SHOCKING
 See influence of both early motion picture technology, cubism, and futurism in an attempt to show overlapping stages of motion
• making fun of Futurists because they take themselves so seriously and doesn’t agree with them about impact of modern technology
• Futurists bragged they would never go inside an art museum but HE USES A CLASSICAL FEMALE FIGURE
 What offends people about this piece?
• Idea of female nudes up to this period—all mythological, idealized, beautiful, soft, curving forms, passive forms
• This is transgressive as far as challenging that depiction of the female figure
o De-personalization of human beings at machine age
- Art Nouvea
o centered around architectural interior decoration
o categorized by the influence of Japanese prints
o one of the first times artists argue that art should not have to form any social commentary or have a serious message—they argue that it should be able to just be beautiful for its own sake.
o Klimt
 became part of a Europe-wide 1890s revolt against tradition and conservative society called The Vienna Secession. He was part of the Vienna Secession
 He goes to Ravenna, where he sees Byzantine mosaics
 work shows lots of flat areas which look purely like decorative pattern combined with 3-D modeled flesh
 lots of sexual imagery
 Concentric circles—female genitalia
 flattened cylinders—symbolic of male genitalia
Art Nouvea
o Beardsley
 A young, English printmaker
 Died of a heroin overdose at 26 years old
 Did the prints that illustrated Oscar Wilde’s novel Salome
 Impact of Japanese prints very clear
Art Nouvea
- Fauvism
 Artists are “The Fauve”—means “wild beast”—took their name from an art critic who hated their work, but they loved the name
 believed that color was not given to us so that we could recreate nature; it was given to us so we could express our emotions
 Working directly out of influence of Van Gogh, but mainly Gauguin
• Purposeful discoloration based on vision
• Use explosive color in completely unnatural ways
 Henri Matisse
• Picasso used to call himself and Matisse the North and South poles of art, long friendship, would exchange paintings, influence each other
• Loved music, played the violin to warm up for painting
• Synesthesia—sensory input of one form that brings forth another sensory image from another sense
• trying to create an art devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter
• second phase is more escapist and joyful with basic characteristics—curving lines, flat and bold color, patterns
Fauvism
Derain
o He collected African masks—we see the influence of African art
o good friend of Matisse
o see scenes from his time in London
o expressive, emotional use of bold color
o doesn’t describe the world, rather, he describes the interior experience of this world.
Fauvism
Die Brücke (The Bridge)
- a group that organizes themselves almost like a medieval guild
- believed that the old times are corrupt and need to be swept out and their art would be the bridge into the future.
- Art exposes shallowness, corruption, materialism of the bourgeois society in Germany, and that that would help to bring in a more positive future.
- use color and distorted forms in a non-optically-true way
- use jagged contours and odd perspectives
Kirchner
- The Bridge
-point out selfishness of bourgeoisie in Germany which he sees as fake and unsympathetic
-Angular, sharp, almost mechanized kinds of form
-Lots of street scenes
-Hitler removes his art
-morphine addiction, commits suicide
Nolde
The Bridge
o He met and was very influenced by James Ensor and his use of masks, believes that when people put on masks their true, bestial identity comes out
o He did a number of religious images, but he always shows the sinful and brutish nature of human beings
- Kandinsky
o Cerebral and intellectual person who read constantly (philosophy, science);
o caused him to lose faith in the material substance of the world around us
o He was married to another German artist, Gabriel Münter
o He truly believed that pure colors tap directly into the human psyche
o The name of the whole group came from a piece Kandinsky did of a blue man riding a horse
o begins to embrace the idea that color and pure forms are so powerful that you do not need to have recognizable subject matter—abandons representation, called improvisations; non-objective
• Abstract: you start with a recognizable object and simplify it
• Non-objective: start with nothing
Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter
It is based in Munich
Marc
Der Blaue Reiter
- desire to be back in harmony with nature, but he feels we are so far from that state that he hardly ever puts human figures in his paintings. Instead he uses animals
He believed there was a universal language of color. Blue represents the masculine; yellow represents the feminine.
Fragmentary, shard-like, almost kaleidoscope effect
was destroyed in WWI and died in trench warfare.
Marson Hartley
• Paintings are sort of like collages
• Hartley was gay and fell in love with a young German military officer named Karl Von Friedrich
• Hartley will use his techniques when he comes back to America and becomes one of the key founders of modernist art in the U.S.
Der Blaue Reiter
Lehmbruck
A sculptor
Larger than life-size, elongated, stylized. The impact of elongation makes them seem vulnerable and fragile
Der Blaue Reiter
 Maillol
• Takes what look kind of like Classical nudes, only they have a very calm mood, but he tends to simplify them and make them more abstract
sculptor
 Rodin
-Earlier of the two; Most important sculptor of the 19th century
-“The Thinker”
-Purposely leaves works unfinished because he was so moved by Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures
o Modersohn-Becker
woman
-riveted by works of Gauguin—abstract/ethnic art impacts her
-Abstract, neo-primitive sort of style
-Independent German Expressionists
o Schiele
-Very radical with his paintings of the figure
- intentionally sexual,Speaking out against taboos of sexuality in art up to this point
- Independent German Expressionists
- Picasso
-Cubist
o Enormously talented child prodigy
o At 18, moves completely independently to Paris
o Constantly searching for alternative ways to visually represent the world around us, both the objects and the space
o Blue Period
 Was living in a tiny, freezing apartment in Paris, was barely scraping by
 Works tend to be very blue, depressive in mood and use lots of blues
o Rose Period
 Becomes friends with two important art patrons who begin to buy works of the most avant-garde artists
 Gertrude and Leo Stein--Were wealthy, bought a lot of works from avant-garde artists
 More move toward abstraction
o A turning point—sees a collection of African masks and sculptures--Radical abstraction and simplification
 Earliest collaborations with Georges Braque
o Archipenko
- Analytic Cubist Sculpture
 Both influenced by use of abstraction and the looking at figures from multiple vanishing points
 Influenced by African sculpture
• Treatment of head
o A void; negative space that creates the space of the head
o Invoking images from traditional art—classical female nude
o Gonzales
- Analytic Cubist Sculpture
 Picasso’s friend when young, taught Picasso how to weld
 In doing his own art, welded together pieces of steel and metal
 New kind of sculpture
Phase TWO of Cubism
: Synthetic Cubism
- Synthetic: bringing things together, combining
- INVENTION OF THE COLLAGE
- Up until this point in time, appropriate materials you could make art from
- Picasso and Braque start looking around, see little fragments from different things, cut out little pieces, take these pieces OUT of their original contexts and re-combine them to create a new meaning
- Love doing this so much that they just start painting to make it look like out of waste basket
Stuart Davis
Had a big influence on Pop Art
Wanted to have a very American take on Synthetic Cubism
painted his works to make it appear to be different kinds of materials.
uses American images in his works
uses jazz-infused rhythms in the arrangements of his forms.
Orphism (French)
- Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay-Terk were two of the biggest players in this movement.
- borrow the methods of Analytic Cubism but retain the very expressive use of color from Fauvism.
Sonia Delaunay- Terk
orphism
She is frequently non-objective— not showing real images, but rather color.
o Used as designs for textiles, interior decoration elements, etc.
Delaunay
- He had started working as a Fauve, working alongside Matisse and Derain
- borrow the methods of Analytic Cubism but retain the very expressive use of color from Fauvism.
- uses recognizable subject matter—his favorite object to use was the Eiffel tower.
Orphism
The Futurists
- Specifically Italian movement
- Very controversial, out to make people angry
- Out to make a definitive break with the past that they saw as corrupt and meaningless
- Saying all of good or bad these things that come with the urban age are GOOD
- Founder was poet named F.T. Marinetti
- Balla
futurist
o Cinema/motion picture art becoming popular at this time
o The whole idea of having something moving in a singular frame
- Muybridge
o Really important early photographer who was determined to capture motion photographically
o Series after series with multiple cameras on a timer in order to capture stages of motion the human eye cannot freeze
o One famous example—horse
- Boccioni
 Believes that the de-humanization of the modern world is A GOOD THING
• Nothing remotely human other than the basic form—Sharpened, angular, machine-like
 Even the title dehumanizes the figure within
o Also a painter
• Vibrant from bold colors
• Blurred contours
• Suggest motion—vibrant colors, diagonal lines, blurred contours, tight/elastic curving lines
o Try to imitate the machine that comes with this age
futurist
Severini
futurist
 Depiction of war
 Machines
 Idea of war as being the hygiene of the war, coming in and cleansing forms
 Sharp edges
o Popova
 Made a trip from Russia to Europe in 1915 and was exposed to both analytic cubism and futurism—CUBO-FUTURISM
 Was so profoundly moved by them that she adopted forms of both of them
 Thought the future of Russia was a new, technological society expressed best in both cubism and futurism
 Non-objective work that look sort of vaguely like architectural forms
-2nd movement of Russian avant-garde
Russian Avant-garde
- A LOT going on—Russian Revolution; end of rule by the tsar, first Communist revolution
- People in such a mood for change that there’s going to be a lot of room for cutting-edge art
Suprematism
1st movement of Russian avant garde
o Very cerebral, intellectual movement
o Malevich
Suprematism
 Believed that the supreme reality in the world is pure feeling which attaches to no visible object, and that therefore called for is a new, non-objective type of art
 The only way of depicting clear feeling is by tying it to some geometrical object
 White backgrounds with Different colored shapes floating in space
Pre WWI Realism
Used to make a political statement and to express Utopian Ideals.
American Ashcan School
The American Ashcan School
Eight artists; frustrated with the extreme conservatism of the Philadelphia Academy.
 Didn’t want to clean anything, just wanted nitty-gritty street scenes; what life was really like
Sloan
AAS
o Painterly, undetailed brushwork
o Repelling against academy
o Impression of the people moving through the streets of the city
o Soft focus-sense of the chaos
Bellows
AAS
o A very talented baseball player; tough, manly guy
o Across from his apartment, could see through windows, a boxing gym—Many scenes show brutal combats between boxers
o Beautiful idealized males and human brutality
o Keen eye for human personality quirks
- German Expressionists
 At the end of WW1, is lost in a sense of disillusionment and disbelief because of their loss in the war, humiliation and wounding of their national pride
 German people angry over terms of Treaty of Versailles
• Especially the Guilt Clause—unfairly expected to take all responsibility for the war
 After war, middle class is going to go on a big time spending spree--Huge live-it-up because life is short philosophy
o Comes to a screeching halt in Germany in 1924 when the terms of the city of Versailles kick in=ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
• Hitler gets start in 1924, fascism continues from this point on
• World changing so fast
o Kollwitz
 Grew up in a ardently socialist family
• In work, calls attention to suffering in general, mainly that of the poor
• Also the suffering of mothers who lose their children through malnutrition and disease
 Always works in monochrome, black and white
• use purposely harsh stylistic techniques
o Expressive use of color, Harsh lines, Distortion of figures and proportions
printmaking
German Expressionism
o New Objectivity
Interwar Fantasy
 All three of these artists served and were active in WW1 and are profoundly affected by experiences in war
• Believe that their world has been shattered, the old one doesn’t exist
• Trying to usher in a new German society based on an honest, pessimistic depiction of the world they see around them
 Grosz
new objectivity
• Uses analytic cubism
• Shard-like, kaleidoscopic, chaotic views
• Loves to show the self-satisfied, self-absorbed middle class man only caring about himself, oblivious to suffering
 Dix
new objectivity
• Fought in WW1, saw friends blown to bits
• Depicts a lot of mutilated vets
Beckmann
new objectivity
He was a medic in army—had to deal with all kinds of mutilations
images of horrible human suffering and mutilation
- Mexican Muralists
 The decade of the Mexican Revolution, a very important revolution because, the land in Mexico was controlled by only 10% of population
• Need for land reform, give some land to the indigenous people
o Rivera and Orozco don’t want art to be a commodity, want it for public people, doing mainly MURALS
Rivera
- originally very influenced by the Synthetic Cubists
- always uses elements from his homeland as the subject matter
- blown away by Giotto’s frescoes—lead to murals and dignified figures
- displaying upper class as uncaring and cold, then suffering peasants
- portrait for Rockefeller center censored because of its references to Lenin and capitalism—made Rivera hero
mexican muralist
o Orozco
 “Epic of American Civilization, Hispano-America”
• Strong and firm balanced indigenous figure above everyone else
• All the figures of justice and evil and chaos are caricatured
• Impact of revolution, old power being destroyed, future generations
• Military all old and blind, as if they cannot see what is happening to the people of Mexico
mexi muralist
Interwar Abstraction
Appears much calmer for the most part—it is more intellectual and cerebral rather than emotional. Most artists in this period are Independent
Picasso (again)
- Assemblage: takes found objects from out in the world, taken out of their context—put together to create something new.
Picasso had an incredibly long career
- crosses all chronological divisions and in all sorts of styles.
o “GUERNICA”
 Spanish Civil War of 1937
 Fascist leader named Franco was not leader yet
 There is a war between the Fascists and the loyalists
• Hitler is already in control of Germany and he wants to get Franco under his control, completely bombs Guernica at market time
- Leger
o Called his work “Purism”
o Believes in the Machine Esthetic
 Belief that machines are things of beauty and pretty to look at
Independent Sculptors in Interwar Abstraction
abstraction in two different directions
-One uses machine esthetic and geometric abstraction
-One depict forms that look like living organisms/cells
Brancusi
interwar abstraction sculpture
- simplified, but into biomorphic forms instead of machine-like figures, looks like an organism
- believed that the natural world can be abstracted down into just a few organic shapes and forms
British Abstract Sculptors
grew up in the British countryside. very much influenced by rolling landscape in England
o Moor
British Abstract Sculptor
 Countryside of England—curving hills and hollows—in childhood
 Reclining figures
 Deviating from traditional sculpture because he uses large empty spaces/voids
o Hepworth
 Completely non-objective/representational
 Landscape in form
 Soft, curving edges that suggest biomorphic forms
British interwar abstract sculptor
o Calder
 Inventor of the mobile
 sculpture that is light and airy, breaking completely with traditions of sculpture
 “4-D Drawings”-->Duchamp named them mobiles
 Achieving asymmetrical balance
 Surrealists LOVE his work because they are focusing of unconscious kinds of energy from Freud
also makes stabiles
British Interwar Abstraction
Precisionism
in Interwar Abstraction
- Americans incorporating Synthetic Cubism
- Embraces machine esthetic, modern machine
- Demuth
precisionism
o Creates landscapes that incorporate synthetic cubism
o Flat planes of color
o Analytic cubism because of the fragmentary, shard-like experiences
o Very unusual landscapes because industrial sort of image
o Machine aesthetic
De Stijl
, Holland
- Cerebral, intellectual movement
- all humans desire a sense of harmony and balance within the universe that can be achieved through “equivalent oppositions.”
- dynamic equilibrium- finding harmony and balance between things that are unalike but that can still achieve harmony and balance
"The Style"
- Mondrian
De Stijl
 Idea of equivalent oppositions, asymmetrical balance
o Limits himself to what he thinks are the most basic colors in painting
 Red, blue, yellow
 Black ,white
 Shape of square or rectangle
 NOT MATHEMATICAL, simply random, rearranges them in as many different combinations as he can in order to make him feel harmony and balance
- O’Keefe
o A fiercely independent artist who doesn’t want to be associated with any group of painters
o Calm and beautiful images of upstate New York—had a country home
o Famous because of huge images of tiny parts of flowers
o visionary landscape desert scenes
- Dada
interwar fantasy
o Born during the chaos and confusion and widespread misery of WW1
o A bunch of really ticked off young people who are unbelievably angry at elders for giving them such a screwed up world
o Their art is intended to challenge/tick off/offend all values inherited from the past with idea that if you don’t tear everything down and question everything, its bad
o See randomness, chance, spontaneity, sarcasm and humor, irony
o Arp
DADA
• Believe that it doesn’t matter what we do with our lives, we are subject to chance
• Tore up colored pieces of paper, then would drop them on paper and let them stay where they dropped
o Duchamp
DADA
 During war years, joins the other Dada artists in using his energy to question the role of art and the artist
 More important to him than producing things that are pretty—THINGS THAT PROVOKE THOUGHT
 Invents the “ready-made”
• Takes objects that have had some sort of utilitarian value in the past OUT of their original function, alters them in some way, presents them to us to be contemplated as a piece of art
• Appropriation -- when an artist borrows the work of somebody else to use for their own purposes; make no pretense that the work they borrowed is their own, but they are going to use it for their own individual purpose
o Big deal in post-modern art because up until late 20th century art, critics pushing artists to be more individual and creative and original
Rectified Ready-made:
took a print and rectified/fixed it for a new meaning
Assisted Ready-made:
He destroys the function of the two original objects when you put them together
Hoch
exemplar of photo montage
takes pictures that are found in other types of media and arranges them in completely random, confusing kinds of way
o Schwitters
DADA
 Outside apartment, could see a big, tattered billboard
• Put on in strips, when all on were for a bank
• Over time, two outside strips fell off and the last strip meant nothing
 Taking things that have never been considered art before out of original context, put them all together, BUT IS NOT CREATING ANY NEW MEANING
• Randomness and chance
o Man Ray
DADA
• Starts by taking a utilitarian object but he alters it and destroys the function
• Invented the “Rayograph”--Takes synthesized photo paper, random objects on top, exposes them for a few seconds, end up with eerie, dreamlike images that are evocative
Surrealism
- all about attempts to tap into the imagery that would come from the unconscious mind- parts of reality that are least accessible, as an impact of Freud.
- 1. Artists’ use of spontaneity and lack of planning to create images that are like Freud’s Rorschach images (ink blots) exercising little conscious control
- 2. Artists’ creation of works of almost photographic realism of absurdity, things that would never be found together. Their attempt is to de-familiarize the ordinary by taking things we would see and putting them together in impossible ways.
o Max Ernst
o Fever as little boy--visions
o Decalcomania- (creates this)- put paint from a tube directly on canvas- maybe a couple of colors, put something on top, smash down, peel off- interesting patterns and veinsLook at it and let mind wander until image came up
o Uses frottage --A rubbing and then let mind wander, until images appear
o Basis and then build image around it
Art Patrons
Art patronage is still extraordinarily important. People who have a significant amount of money commission works (the Guggenheim family)—like the Guggenheim museums.
Peggy Guggenheim, daughter of the original art patron, was passionate about this new avant-garde, non-traditional works. She spent fortunes trying to keep them afloat. She married Max Ernst.
Miró
- Surrealism: using as little conscious control as possible—only suggestive things that may bring up things from the unconscious.
- grew up on a farm, and therefore lots of his images look almost like little creatures
- Combines ink drawing with areas of color.
- His method: He would go through catalogs, and cut out pictures of machinery parts, and then drop those images on a canvas that he had already pre-painted with soft edged, rectangular areas of color—morphing into another color. When the images landed on the canvas, he would outline them and either leave them as outlines or color them in with different solid colors. Look for weird, non-fully-formed creatures that look like cartoons from another planet.
Klee
surrealist
He was part of The Bauhaus, a very famous German art school.
- really drawn to the art of early-age children. He believed it plugged us directly into Karl Jung’s collective unconscious—he always does the same kinds of shapes and stick figures, because he thinks it’s a reflection of cave paintings and prehistoric art—and therefore it must have a universal human meaning.
Magritte
surrealist
- wanted to de-familiarize the ordinary and to familiarize the extraordinary—juxtaposition of regular and extraordinary.
- bowler hats.
- More Meret Oppenheim, female
Oppenheim
- Takes a very ordinary object out of its ordinary context and puts it together with another object to render it completely useless—this involves our tactile senses
- Dali
Surrealist
- bizarre guy with a very bizarre relationship with his wife Gala (she was a sex-fiend, insatiable dominatrix).
- obsessed with and impossibly in love with the poet Lorca who was his first true love.
- Photographic realism
- small format
- Double images
- Flaccid flesh and sexual violence
- He was impotent—couldn’t have an erection—it plays out in his work all the time
o Frida Kahlo
surrealist
 Would be unhappy in the context of a Surrealist
 Called them a bunch of crazy kooks
 Career of psychologically revealing self-portraits
Constructivism
art should be practical—ought to be based in technology of modern world.
Resemble architecture.
o Tatlin
constructivism
 “Monument to the Third International”
• Was going to be a propaganda, government office, radio center
• HUGE—2 times Empire State Building
• Enormous expense so wasn’t ever constructed
• Shows how truly forward-thinking Russians were at this time
Mukhina
She has no sub-category, but uses Realism as propaganda to try to make an absolutely visually accessible image of the ideal Soviet Union
American Regionalist
Midwestern subjects to trumpet farmer values.
visually accessible style
images reflect the depression in the Midwest
Thomas Hart Benton
social critique of the Midwestern values
Steamboat, images of slaves, Native Americans being subdued by the white people, people working in fields
Grant Wood
Celebrating farm lifestyle of America
“American Gothic”
Edward Hopper
- fiercely independent artist.
- particularly struck by the alienation of the individual in the modern city—loneliness, isolation in the modern period.
- paintings are marked by asymmetry—they have a low light source that casts long, low shadows.
- lot of empty space
- dominated by vertical and horizontal lines
- sense of quiet loneliness
Social Realism
Shahn and Lawrence
Shahn
He does a very famous series of paintings that are about Sacco and Vanzetti “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti”
Lawrence
- A very well known, important African- American artist
- he tells stories by means of using lots of pictures and then next to each picture, a caption that would have several lines of text telling the story
- series of “The Migration of the Negro”—huge numbers moved to Harlem, resulting in the Harlem Renaissance
series on H Tubman
The Harlem Renaissance
same time of the jazz age and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance—huge artistic outpouring. Shows African American history
Douglas
THR
An African American painter who incorporated African sculpture and Cubism
flat planes of color
Post WW2 Expressionism
- Horrible and devastating WW1 in terms of physical destruction and loss of life; WW2 takes this to a whole new level
o Leaves Europeans shattered
- Existentialism arises—existence is absurdity and any attempt to find truth or meaning is futile
- Giacometti
o Works express the vulnerability of human beings, the entire human condition, with emaciated figures
o Capture vulnerability of human condition
 Tall and spindly
 Looks very easily breakable
 Sense of loneliness and isolation

Existentialism
- Bacon
 Living in city of London during the Blitz in 1941-42
 Images express sense of absolute senseless brutality
o Drawn to the image of the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velasquez
 When the Pope saw this portrait by Velasquez, saw the way it made him appear as commanding/brutal/powerful
 Almost an image of human power, but Bacon is going to turn it upside down and use similar images of the pope to show human weakness and vulnerability
 Someone who has no control, human brutality
• Called the “Screaming Pope” series
Existentialism
- Dubuffet
o Bitterness about life in the post-war era
o Formally trained but believed that traditional art and traditional art forms are incapable of expressing horrors that humans have just witnessed
o Becomes more attracted to art of children and people in mental institutions because they are not marked by anything except fierce, savage expression
o Moves to a completely different style down the road and becomes more known for sculpture
o Doing biomorphic forms and limits himself to white sculptures that uses black outlining
Existentialism
• Abstract Expressionism –
Expressionism and Abstraction merge in U.S. after WWII; influenced by art critic Clement Greenburg who calls on artists to abandon illusionism and representation and instead focus on formal qualities of whatever medium they’re working with
• Pollock
–goes on vacations to Arizona and becomes fascinated with Navajo sand painting and doing art work that is down on the ground; most of New York School artists are completely non-representational; paintings are a snapshot of the acting out of process of creating painting, rather than a representation of artist’s emotions; married to Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner
o Gorky
 Was a Jew who escaped from Armenia during Armenian Holocaust
 Work is never completely non-objective
 Begins with some object in mind, combines
 Think colorful biomorphic forms combined with spontaneous color of Kandinsky
o De Kooning
 One of Pollock’s dearest friends and closest allies
 Action painting
 Series of female figures—“Woman” series
 Very expressive
• Harsh angles
• Dark lines
• Slashing/rough brushmarks
• Smudges and blur
• Color Field Painting / Chromatic Abstraction
– more meditative, quieter mood, exploring the purely expressive qualities of large fields of color to communicate universal human experiences; intend for their works to be emotionally expressive
•Barnet Newman
works function by being very large scale, vertical lines in painting called zips to express the desire of humans to try to survive
• Mark Rothko
believed that color expresses the most basic human emotions, floats rectangles of color on top of other colors
* Frankenthaler
* She would take completely unprimed canvas/ sale cloth on floor, then put highly thinned oil paint in a coffee can, pour the coffee can onto the canvas- soak into unprimed canvas- have veil like edges
* Then she would spread that paint using sponges, ect.
* It makes really beautiful paintings that look like satellite pictures of landscape- aware of
these painters are more formalist—they explore the technical aspects of the medium itself.
Louis
He uses unprimed canvas, but uses thinned acrylic paint instead of oil. He has the canvas tilting, and then pours this very thin acrylic paint onto it, tilting the canvas in the way he wants the paint to run. He is exploring the quality of the paint and canvas, plus combining the artistic randomness/chance and artistic control.
these painters are more formalist—they explore the technical aspects of the medium itself.
Hard-Edged Abstraction
they want to create such a pure piece of art that there is no sign of the original artists—they want the viewer to interact directly with the forms and colors without expressive, personal interference on the part of the artist
Kelly
Uses basic shapes and pure colors; his of color are pure and flat; no brush marks; hard, crisp edges
hard-edged abstraction
Stella
He likes the Chevron shape—uses it again and again.
Understand that the white part we look at is the wall—the shape of actual canvas is the form. These artists are trying to make a definitive break with the artists of the past—they are avoiding displaying a rectangular canvas that could represent a window into another reality.
He mixes in metallic bits into the paint so the paint looks almost like car paint—with a metallic sheen. Trying to give the illusion that it was created by a machine instead by an individual artist.
hard-edged abstraction
The Minimalists
Sculpture—we see pure geometry, a very intellectual movement without any personal expression. They use mathematical progressions and are very careful to use surfaces that appear machine made
Judd
Likes to use [colored] Plexiglas so you can see down into his pieces
A mood of calm orderliness that pervades the whole atmosphere
He loves reflective surfaces
Flavin
A revolutionary sculptor in his use of a non-traditional medium for making art that was representative of the modern world (colored fluorescent lighting)
The piece of art is not just the actual lights—it is the entire space. He is concerned with the impact of light on the space it’s in.
Installation: a sculpture that fills an entire room
The High Modern Style (architecture)
The tall, unornamented glass and steel skyscraper is popular in architecture at this time It is about proportion, the beauty of precision, and the machine aesthetic. Beautiful, simple, pleasing abstract forms
Smith
- a sculptor, he takes pieces of steel and cuts and welds them together
- Made of steel—always about asymmetrical balance.
- hardly look attached, yet balance in this amazing way.
- Varnishes steel so its reflective
- suggest organic forms—humans, trees—but they aren’t.
(non-Minimalist man)
Nevelson
-
she is fascinated by the process of transition.
- wanted her art to suggest “the in-between place…
- She uses found objects, like Dada and Surrealists, and puts them together in box-like shapes that are huge and paints them all the same color.
(non-Minimalist woman)
Hesse
- she wanted to portray the chaos and randomness that being human is about.
- uses non-traditional materials, like latex and rope, to create sculptures which look almost like Minimalist sculptures in the process of disintegrating.
(non-Minimalist woman)
Op Art
Creation of forms that are paintings and appear to have kinetic effects—they almost appear as if they are in motion.
Riley
A well-known British artist that liked to use wavy lines that appeared to be in motion or images that appear to be in motion if you look at them long enough
POP Art
- Pop Art shows the reaction against modern art and its non-representation
- Use humor, objects, representation, irony—social criticism
- Re-introduce representation to art
- Breaking down the barriers between high brow and low browappropriate images from mass media, advertising, script and language, trademark images .
- trying to get us to see that we are bombarded with images every day to affect our behavior all of the time
- simply to comment on the shallowness and greed of American culture
Hamilton
Just What is it that Makes Today’s Homes so Different, So appealing?
Title is reminiscent of the language used in advertising
Tootsie pop gave this art its name
Hamilton is challenging the kind of “acceptable” images to include in art—distinguish between high-brow and low-brow art :
Johns
He uses images that are around us all the time. He is fascinated by the relationship between an object that we see so regularly and a representation of that object.
Rauschenberg
Paint surfaces and sculptures attached (an assemblage)—combine paintings
combined things that had no connection/relationship except that they are images that strike us all of the time in the modern world
Lichtenstein
Started out as an advertising artist
Copying O’Keefe’s technique of zooming in
Calling attention to phenomenon of how popular comic books were; stereotyping of gender roles
Andy Warhol
- Eccentric human being
- Multiples of things
- As an artist, becomes very aware of the fact that advertising bombards us with images
- Concept that we constantly have images thrown in front of our face
- Thinks the whole phenomenon of Marilyn Monroe shows the shallowness of America
Oldenburg
- He uses everyday objects and does unexpected things with them—
- demonstrated objects that we except to feel a particular way in different ways—things that were supposed to be hard become collapsing, and soft.
- Then goes through period where he makes fluffy models of things
-takes objects so common that we don’t pay any attention to them and turns them into massive sculptures
Super-Realism (Photo Realism)
Artists who imitate the characteristics of photography in the form of painting
Flack
-she combines images of photos with still-life images that connect with the meaning of the photos
-kind of feminist
-lots of symbolism
Chuck Close
He does big, close up canvases of people's faces
He makes the portrait as close to the appearance of a photograph as he absolutely can
no commissions--does images of himself and his friends
Hanson
A sculptor referred to in Photo Realism
His method: he did casts of people and then combined castings of different people into finished pieces
He dressed them with contemporary clothing and outfitted them with contemporary objects
He focused on the Middle and Lower class—a sense of resignation about their lives
Environmental Art/ Site-Specific Art/ Earthworks
- Create things intentionally that are not intended to do permanent alterations to the environment
- Frequently in remote locations to draw people out to these locations that they wouldn’t otherwise see
- Rebelling against limitations posed by art patrons—people would buy/sellTemporary, no one can own
Smithson
Spiral Jetty,In the Great Lake of Salt Lake City
- spiral seems to have some universal, human significance
-He did this to call attention to the destruction – this was done in an abandoned quarry- a very remote location
Heizer
He displaces huge amounts of soil
Not intended to be beautiful—intended to make people think about the way that the earth is used and exploited
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
- Loves wrapping things, using fabric in landscapes
- after a few weeks, they are always recycled (all the materials)
The Post-Modern Period
Much of what we see in Post-Modern Art is the intentionally turning of backs on traditional easel paintings, traditional sculpture, traditional art to make people wealthier—it can’t be bought and sold
We see a lot of conceptual art: based on the belief that what isreally important is not the product, it’s the inspiration (the process of thinking through the creation)
Neo-Expressionism
Involves American and European artists who respond to the modern condition in very expressive ways
Kiefer
was haunted by the stories of what happened in the Holocaust—he felt national shame for what happened in his own country. His works, therefore, frequently explore the feelings of guilt and dismay of what he countrymen were capable of doing
Feminist Art
Feminist: anyone who believes men and women should have the same opportunities
examines the way that women in particular are portrayed by the media—the expectations for behavior and appearance of women; images constantly being pounded into the heads of men and women alike
Chicago
She makes a radical installation “The Dinner Party”
It is a feminist take on Leonardo’s Last Supper
She is commenting that thousands of women across the ages that would have loved to be artists but did not have the opportunity—she picks great women throughout time and use a trinity-like triangular form
The Post-Modern Period
Much of what we see in Post-Modern Art is the intentionally turning of backs on traditional easel paintings, traditional sculpture, traditional art to make people wealthier—it can’t be bought and sold
We see a lot of conceptual art: based on the belief that what isreally important is not the product, it’s the inspiration (the process of thinking through the creation)
Neo-Expressionism
Involves American and European artists who respond to the modern condition in very expressive ways
Kiefer
was haunted by the stories of what happened in the Holocaust—he felt national shame for what happened in his own country. His works, therefore, frequently explore the feelings of guilt and dismay of what he countrymen were capable of doing
Feminist Art
Feminist: anyone who believes men and women should have the same opportunities
examines the way that women in particular are portrayed by the media—the expectations for behavior and appearance of women; images constantly being pounded into the heads of men and women alike
Chicago
She makes a radical installation “The Dinner Party”
It is a feminist take on Leonardo’s Last Supper
She is commenting that thousands of women across the ages that would have loved to be artists but did not have the opportunity—she picks great women throughout time and use a trinity-like triangular form
Shaprio
raises awareness of the contributions women had made in more than traditional art forms (Fabric, textiles, quilting) typically thought of as craft rather than art